Category: Morons

“Four years ago a viral campaign wooed the world with a promise of fighting climate change and jump-starting the economy by replacing tarmac on the world’s roads with solar panels. The bold idea has undergone some road testing since then.

The first results from preliminary studies have recently come out, and they’re a bit underwhelming.

A solar panel lying under a road is at a number of disadvantages.

As it’s not at the optimum tilt angle, it’s going to produce less power and it’s going to be more prone to shading, which is a problem as shade over just 5% of the surface of a panel can reduce power generation by 50%.”

“The panels are also likely to be covered by dirt and dust, and would need far thicker glass than conventional panels to withstand the weight of traffic, which will further limit the light they absorb.

Unable to benefit from air circulation, its inevitable these panels will heat up more than a rooftop solar panel too. For every 1°C over optimum temperature you lose 0.5% of energy efficiency.

As a result a significant drop in performance for a solar road, compared to rooftop solar panels, has to be expected. The question is by how much and what is the economic cost?”

“The last piece of the ice sheet that once blanketed much of North America is doomed to disappear in the next several centuries, says a new study by researchers at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and the University of Colorado Boulder.”

Sad to say SFU is my alma mater.

“The Barnes Ice Cap, a Delaware-sized feature on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, is melting at a rapid pace, driven by increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that have elevated Arctic temperatures. The ice cap, while still 500 meters thick, is slated to melt in about 300 years under business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions.”

They love predictions that won’t come true for 300 years. It won’t interfere in the grant money harvesting.

“The results provide compelling evidence that the current level of warming is almost unheard of in the past 2.5 million years, according to the authors. Only three times at most in that time period has the Barnes Ice Cap been so small, a study of isotopes created by cosmic rays that were trapped in rocks around the Barnes Ice Cap indicated.”

Wait … “almost unheard of”? Almost?

Wait … “Only three times at most”?

“This is the disappearance of a feature from the last glacial age, which would have probably survived without anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions,”

Probably?

“The geological data is pretty clear that the Barnes Ice Cap almost never disappears in the interglacial times,”

“November 2012: The Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) is set up by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment in a bid to encourage businesses to switch from oil or gas to wood pellet boilers.”

Just stop and think. They subsidized wood pellets (one of the dirtiest fossil fuels) to get people to switch from natural gas (the cleanest fossil fuel). Not only that … wood pellets produce way more CO2 than natural gas.

Utter insanity.

Why?

“It is part of Northern Ireland’s plan to meet renewable energy targets.”

Ahhh. The scheme relied on the stupidity of people and politicians confusing the term green and renewable with clean and CO2 free.

Sure. Wood pellets are renewable. But they are filthy with particulate matter and they produce 2x more CO2 (or more) than gas.

What went wrong? Can you guess?

“Autumn 2013: A whistleblower contacts the department, warning of flaws with the RHI, which she claims overpays businesses and does not provide an incentive to be energy efficient. Officials at the department look into her allegations but they are dismissed.”

Right. The subsidy pays you more if you burn more wood pellets. To an unlimited amount. If the government promised to pay you 10$ for every 5$ bill you burned there would be mass bonfires of $5 bills.

Summer 2015: Officials move to cut the subsidy paid to businesses, which has no cap, after realising an error in how the initiative was set up means companies could make hundreds of thousands of pounds off it.

The more heat a business generates, the higher the subsidy it is paid, making the scheme bad for both the taxpayer and the environment. For every £1 a business spends on fuel, it gets £1.60 in subsidies from the government.

Insane.

There is a jump in applications to join the scheme before the changes come into effect.

Mosquito populations have increased as much as ten-fold over the past five decades in New York, New Jersey, and California, according to long-term datasets from mosquito monitoring programs. The number of mosquito species in these areas increased two- to four-fold in the same period.

A new study finds the main drivers of these changes were the gradual waning of DDT concentrations in the environment and increased urbanization. The findings were published December 6 in Nature Communications.

The potential effects of climate change on the spread of insect-borne diseases is a major public health concern, but this study found little evidence that mosquito populations in these areas were responding to changes in temperature or precipitation.

In 1970, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimated that DDT saved more than 500 million lives during the time it was widely used. http://www.wnd.com/2004/07/25428/ Banning DDT has resulted in about 100 million deaths, many of whom were pregnant women and children. By comparison: Hitler killed about 6-7 million, Stalin killed around 10-14million, and Mao killed between 60-68 million.

FYI: The ban on DDT is why the US is currently having infestations of bed bugs; most people born after 1940 thought these were eradicated like polio.

A study published in late April by an environmental group found that Europe’s biofuel regulations created 80 percent more carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions than the conventional oil they replaced. The report estimates the biofuels create new emissions equivalent to putting an extra 12 million cars on the road.

Europe has been blending small percentages of biofuels into conventional gasoline and oil and diesel specifically to reduce CO2 emissions. The continent plans to require biofuels account for 10 percent of all fuel used by 2020. The EU’s CO2 emissions are estimated to have increased by 0.7 percent last year relative to 2014, even though the continent has spent an estimated $1.2 trillion financially supporting green and bio-energy with the goal of lowering CO2 emissions.